OHE’s Koonal Shah presented findings from his review of public preferences regarding end of life treatments at the Priorities 2016 conference in Birmingham. Martina Garau chaired a session on MCDA for priority setting in health care.

The 11th biennial meeting of the International Society on Priorities in Health took place at the University of Birmingham on 7-9 September 2016. The meeting was entitled ‘Priorities 2016’. OHE’s Koonal Shah and Martina Garau attended and contributed to the meeting.

Koonal presented the methods and findings of a review of the published literature relevant to the following research question: Do members of the general public wish to place greater weight on a unit of health gain for end of life patients than on that for other types of patients?

This work was also the subject of a previous OHE blog post.

Access Koonal’s presentation below.

Related publications include:

• Shah, K.K., Tsuchiya, A. and Wailoo, A.J., 2015. Valuing health at the end of life: A stated preference discrete choice experiment. Social Science & Medicine, 124, pp.48-56.
• Shah, K.K., 2016. Does society place special value on end of life treatments? In: Round, J. ed. Care at the end of life: An economic perspective. Cham: Springer. pp. 155-166.

Martina chaired an organised session entitled ‘MCDA for setting priorities in health care – introduction, opportunities and challenges’. The session was organised by Rob Baltussen, with Mireille Goetghebeur (University of Montreal) and Norman Daniels (Harvard School of Public Health) as contributors.

The session:

• provided an overview on the use of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to inform coverage decisions;
• showed how MCDA can enable decision makers to consider a broad range of criteria including ethical considerations; and
• explored the concept of reflective MCDA in support of fair process in priority setting.

One of the key points explained and supported by the speakers was that MCDA is not just a mathematical solution but a decision aid that can guide deliberation processes.

The slides from the session are not available, but the following related OHE publications may be of interest:

• Cole, A., Marsden, G., Devlin, N., Grainger, D., Lee, E.K. and Oortwijn, W., 2016. “New Age” Decision Making in HTA: Is It Applicable in Asia? OHE Briefing
• Sussex, J., Rollet, P., Garau, M., Schmitt, C., Kent, A., Hutchings, A., 2013. A Pilot study of multi-criteria decision analysis for valuing orphan medicines. Value in Health. 16(8), pp.1163-1169

For more information on OHE’s research in these areas, please contact via our Meet the Team webpage.